Clean up your Twitter act beautifully with the Twitcleaner

Interaction is the bunny

Because interaction is the secret to Twitter marketing success, it’s a good idea to follow interesting people. That way you maximise your chances of having worthwhile stuff to re-Tweet, comment on, favourite and so on.

If people don’t play the game, there’s less to get your marketing teeth into. After all, nobody wants to read boring stuff.

That’s why I’m an instant fan of the Twitcleaner, an excellent little tool to identify those who are wasting your time – and their own! – in various nefarious and irritating ways. People who:

• keep on Tweeting the same old message time and time again. Yawn
• never Tweet, so there’s no point following them
• never interact with anyone. Ever
• don’t Tweet much, ie. anyone who’s posted fewer than 10 Tweets
• spew out 70% or more re-Tweets, so there’s very little original content
• repeat the same urls, duplicating the same link more than 25% of the time
• exhibit other dodgy behaviour (I know for a fact that one of these is swearing, because Twitcleaner returns my writer’s alter ego, The Nurse, as ‘potentially dodgy’, and she swears like a particularly foul-mouthed sailor)
• hardly follow anyone, ie. follow fewer than 10% of their followers. Although it makes perfect sense for people like Sussex Police, who fall into this category
• people who Tweet about themselves all the time, the overly self-obsessed

Make your own value judgements

Obviously some of these are value judgements, and you need to make your own decision on a case-by-case basis. Which is one reason why I like the Twitcleaner so much. It returns a list of people under each category, including their Twitter icon, and you just click to un-follow. If you make a mistake, you can follow them again.

No twisty-turny things required

You’d need a horribly complex, twisty-turny mathematical algorithm to do the job by hand, so the Twitcleaner is invaluable from a time saving perspective as well as helping you make the best of Twitter. And zapping serial offenders in the nuts is also very satisfying. Virtually speaking, of course.

How do you look?

There’s also a cool how do I look? tool that tells you how you look to other Twitter users, a good way to keep your ego in check and improve your output. And you can punt in other Tweeters’ usernames to see how they look, too.

Zapping the baddies

I ended up zapping twenty or so out of the 300-ish people I follow. It only took a few minutes and Tweeting is suddenly much more of a pleasure.

Friendly bloke, nice site

The bloke who created the tool, Si Dawson, is a diamond geezer, really friendly and helpful. And from a marketer’s perspective the Twitcleaner website is equally good, an attractive exercise in simplicity and functionality with just enough content to sell the service, beautifully expressed, in plain language, with an excellent Q&A page.

Fancy a go? Here’s a link to The Twitcleaner.

Happy zapping! And don’t be tight – remember to donate a few quid if you’ve enjoyed it.

Tags: clean your twitter account., the Twitcleaner

Category: miscellaneous